Chapter XII
Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs
Michael Hanrahan
Bates College, USA
Abstract
This chapter takes as its point of departure the Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin Plagiarism Project (http://leeds.
bates.edu/cbb), which sought to approach the problem of undergraduate plagiarism as a pedagogical
challenge. By revisiting the decision to publish the project’s content by means of a weblog, the article
considers the ways in which weblogs provide a reflective tool and medium for engaging plagiarism. It
considers weblog practice and use and offers examples that attest to the instructional value of weblogs,
especially their ability to foster learning communities and to promote the appropriate use of information and intellectual property.
Introduction
Alarmist news accounts of student dishonesty and
cheating abound. More often than not, such stories
describe how universities, colleges, and even high
schools have resorted to plagiarism detection
services to fight a veritable epidemic of student
cheating. The preferred method of combating
academic dishonesty, after-the-fact detection, is
not the only and is perhaps not the best way to address the problem of student plagiarism. Instead of
fighting the lost cause of plagiarism retroactively,
technologists and librarians at Colby, Bates, and
Bowdoin colleges (CBB) collaborated to develop
a program of instruction to educate students about
the principles of academic honesty. The resulting plagiarism resource site (http://leeds.bates.
edu/cbb) includes an introduction to plagiarism,
an online tutorial that tests one’s understanding
of plagiarism and that provides guidance in the
conventions of citation, and a dedicated weblog
that publishes links to newsworthy articles, notices, and projects dedicated to plagiarism.
Conceived as a case study, this chapter discusses and evaluates the project’s reliance on a
weblog to develop, manage, and publish learning
Copyright © 2008, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs
resources dedicated to plagiarism. In the matter of technical choices, the project developers
were influenced by their commitment to Open
Source Software as well as Creative Commons
licensing. The former influenced the choice of
weblog software, Drupal (http://www.drupal.org),
and the latter informed the decision to make all
of the project’s learning objects and resources
available under an “Attribution-Non-CommercialShare-Alike” Creative Commons license. These
decisions, it turns out, have allowed the project
to model the appropriate use of online materials
and have retrospectively provided an occasion
to reflect on weblogs as an effective medium for
engaging plagiarism.
Background
Over the past several years, national, regional,
local, and campus newspapers across the globe
have regularly featured articles on student cheating. While academic dishonesty takes any number
of forms (using a PDA, cell phone, or crib notes
during an exam; submitting unoriginal work
copied from an existing publication, cut and
pasted from an online source, or purchased from
a paper mill; or simply peering over a classmate’s
shoulder during a quiz), plagiarism has emerged
as the most visible form of student cheating. In
many ways, the term threatens to subsume all
other categories of academic dishonesty. A passing visit to the statistics page at Turnitin’s Web
site (plagiarism.org) reinforces this tendency.
Turnitin, the world’s leading plagiarism detection
service, claims that “A study by The Center for
Academic Integrity (CAI) found that almost 80
percent of college students admit to cheating at
least once.” Besides generalizing and rounding
up the center’s published summary (“On most
campuses, over 75 percent of students admit to
some cheating”), Turnitin’s claim isolates a common tendency to conflate a number of dishonest
“behaviors” with plagiarism. Donald McCabe
(personal communication, August 4, 2004)
explains that the 75 percent figure published
by the CAI “represents about a dozen different
behaviors and was obtained in a written survey.”
Plagiarism is certainly one form of cheating, but
not all cheating is plagiarism.
Reports of plagiarism in the media tend to
indulge in hyperbole: it is consistently described
as nothing less than an epidemic on campuses.
McCabe (1996), who conducted extensive surveys
between 1996 and 2003, repeatedly found that the
facts do not correspond with “the dramatic upsurge
in cheating heralded by the media.” McCabe (2000)
has elsewhere observed: “Even though I’ve stated
on previous occasions that I don’t believe these
increases have been as great as suggested by the
media, I must admit I was surprised by the very
low levels of self-reported Internet-related cheating I found.” McCabe has subsequently further
qualified his view of the problem: “Although
plagiarism appears to have remained relatively
stable during the past 40 years, . . . it is actually
far more prevalent today because many students
don’t consider cut-and-paste Internet copying as
cheating” (Hansen, 2003, p. 777). More recently,
McCabe’s evaluation of his 2002-2003 Survey
of U.S. Colleges and Universities identifies an
increase in certain kinds of cheating and a continued misunderstanding of plagiarism among
undergraduates: “The past few decades have seen
a significant rise in the level of cheating on tests
and exams. . . . While the data on various forms
of cheating on written assignments do not reflect
the same trend, this may be due to a change in
how students define cheating” (2004, p. 127).
To complicate matters further, statistical estimates of academic dishonesty seem to vary due
to contexts (including education level and geography). For example in a recent survey of graduate
students enrolled in 32 business programs in the
United States and Canada, McCabe, Butterfield,
and Treviño (2006) have reported that business
students tend to cheat more than other graduate
students: “Fifty-six percent of graduate business
Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs
students, compared to 47 percent of their nonbusiness peers, admitted to engaging in some form of
cheating . . . during the past year” (p. 299). The
level of self-reported cut-and-paste plagiarism in
this survey, in turn, was “33 percent of the graduate
business students . . . compared to 22 percent for
nonbusiness students” (p. 300). A recent study
conducted by the University of Guelph and coadministered by McCabe and Christensen Hughes
(2006) has estimated that 53 percent of Canadian
undergraduate students engage “in serious cheating on written work” (Gulli, Kohler & Patriquin,
2007). According to Christensen Hughes, “Serious cheating on written work includes copying a
few sentences without footnoting, fabricating or
falsifying a bibliography, or turning in a paper
that someone else has written” (Cooper, 2007). To
help put matters in a global perspective, a recent
survey of British higher education conducted
by Freshminds.co.uk (with the assistance of the
JISC’s Plagiarism Advisory Service and the
Center for Academic Integrity) found that “75
percent of respondents have never plagiarized.”
This figure in turn approximates what Turnitin
representatives have elsewhere estimated: in an
interview for the student newspaper at University
of California, Santa Barbara, Paul Wedlake, director of sales for iParadigms, the parent company
of Turnitin.com, is reported to have claimed that
“approximately 30 percent of all students in the
United States plagiarize on every written assignment they complete” (Ray, 2001).
Regardless of the figures and statistics, the
Internet very much lies at the center of the current fascination with plagiarism. As a result,
the fundamentally ethical nature of the offense
often gets confused with a technological one.
As Patrick Scanlon of the Rochester Institute of
Technology has acknowledged: “‘Plagiarism is not
a technological problem—it’s a problem that has
to do with ethical behavior and the correct use of
sources. And it existed long before the advent of
the Internet’” (Hansen, 2003, p. 791).
Whether attributed to hype or misperception,
plagiarism and the Internet remain entangled in
the popular and the academic imaginations. The
association is further reinforced by student study
habits, especially their research practices. A recent
Pew report found that “nearly three-quarters (73
percent) of college students” in the United States
claim to “use the Internet more than the library”
(Jones, 2002, p. 3). An even greater percentage
of students no doubt resorts to the Internet for
leisure—to game, surf, IM, and share music
files. This reliance on the Internet for study and
entertainment has blurred the lines between appropriate and inappropriate cyberpractice and has
promoted the intentional as well as unintentional
misuse of intellectual and creative property.
The Internet is not the sole source of undergraduate plagiarism. The current manifestation
of the problem also can be attributed to non-technological developments, including the increased
tendency among students and their parents (at
least in the English-speaking world) to perceive
higher education as a service industry. That is,
the relegation of higher education to a service for
which one pays has created a scenario in which
students-as-consumers readily expect performance (in the form of good grades) as something
to which they are entitled. This sense of entitlement, in turn, overrides concerns about academic
honesty. Plagiarism, in this light, emerges as
symptomatic of wide-ranging cultural shifts that
are not simply or easily reducible to technological
shifts and developments. Recent commentary on
student plagiarism has provoked observations on
this phenomenon. For example, Frank Furedi,
professor of sociology at the University of Kent,
has observed that “In the ‘customer-client culture’,
degrees are seen as something you pay for rather
than something you have to learn. It’s the new
ethos of university life” (A Quarter of Students
Cheating, 2004). This cultural shift and attendant
“ethos” may very well lie at the root of the misrecognition of plagiarism among undergraduates
Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs
that McCabe has observed (Hansen, 2007, p. 777;
McCabe, 2004, 127).
Another significant contributing factor to the
rise of plagiarism is an educational culture that
resists adapting its instructional methods in the
face of advances in technology. This resistance
is forcefully demonstrated by the widespread
adoption of plagiarism detection services. In an
ostensible attempt to counter technology with
technology, schools have settled for a punitive
solution to what is a basically an instructional
problem, and in doing so have escalated rather
than engaged the problem. Turnitin, for example,
adds each assignment submitted to its service to
its databases. This ethically questionable practice
of collecting content has been widely criticized
as ignoring the intellectual property rights of
students: the issue was raised several years ago
by Howard (2001); it surfaced in 2003 at the
center of a controversy at McGill University
(McGill Student, 2006); more recently Mount
Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has banned Turnitin for this reason (MSVU
bans anti-plagiarism software, 2006); and high
school students in suburban Washington, D.C.,
have protested their school’s subscription to
Turnitin on the same grounds (Glod, 2006). In
most of these cases, iParadigms has defended its
product against this allegation. In a surprising
move, however, the company recently took the
issue into account when renegotiating its contract
with the University of Kansas: “Because Turnitin.com retains student papers, the service has
raised intellectual property and copyright issues
… Turnitin.com addressed the issue by agreeing
to remove papers from the database if requested
by the KU Writing Center, which administers the
service for KU” (Maines, 2006).
Intellectual property matters aside, the
discourse of combating and surveillance that
commonly attend the use and promotion of plagiarism detection technology seems ill-suited in
an instructional setting. Colleges and universities,
after all, have the luxury of privileging learning
in their approach to problem solving. Recognizing that after-the-fact detection of plagiarism is a
lost cause, faculty, educational technologists, and
librarians at Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin jointly developed a plagiarism resource site that attempts to
discourage student plagiarism through a program
of instruction.1 The project takes for granted that
plagiarism is an inescapable condition of learning.
Such a view is by no means unique: Howard (1999,
p. xviii), who has published widely on the subject,
likens plagiarism to imitation: that is, while trying
to find their own voices as writers, inexperienced
students invariably adopt and imitate the voices of
others and rarely in accordance with the scholarly
conventions of attribution. With this view of the
problem in mind, instruction would seem to be
the desirable as well as the necessary solution to
plagiarism. Many educators share this view, and
few have been more vocal over the years than
librarians, including Burke (2004).
Plagiarism certainly has caught the attention
of instructors, librarians, and administrators, but
students by-and-large continue to have a vague
grasp of it. As Jackson (2006) recently discusses,
“there is clearly evidence to support the notion
that students, in fact, do not understand plagiarism
and lack the necessary skills to avoid it … Many
authors agree that students lack understanding
of what constitutes plagiarism, how to properly
paraphrase, what needs to be cited, and how to
cite sources” (p. 420). The many acts of negligence
or ignorance that constitute plagiarism also vary
in degrees of magnitude: failure to observe accurately the rules for citing sources, for example, is
a different order of offense than the inadvertent,
unattributed incorporation of another’s language
or ideas into a written assignment. These lapses,
in turn, are potentially more easily remedied
than the conscious, pre-meditated submission of
another’s work or ideas as one’s own.
With this range of plagiaristic practices in
mind, Howard (1995, pp. 799-800) has usefully
identified three categories: outright cheating;
non-attribution as a result of unfamiliarity with
Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs
the conventions of citing sources; and “patchwriting,” or stringing together someone else’s
language or ideas without proper attribution.
The CBB plagiarism project seeks to promote
instruction as the best remedy to help teachers
and librarians prevent the last two categories of
plagiarism, which inexperienced students are
especially prone to commit. Based on responses
to the project’s instructional materials, these goals
are being met. For example, Suffolk Community
College has used the project’s online tutorial in
library workshops on Understanding Plagiarism
and Documenting Sources. Students there have
found the tutorial helpful, and “they are always
particularly interested to learn about the need to
cite paraphrases” (Beale 2006). In a recent survey
of an online tutorial on plagiarism, Plagiarism:
The Crime of Intellectual Kidnapping, created
by San Jose State University, Jackson (2006)
has produced convincing evidence that “students
need more instruction and practice with proper
paraphrasing” (p. 426).
To achieve its goal of providing an instructional
solution to plagiarism, the project takes full advantage of the Internet and responsible cyberpractice: its developers chose an open source content
management system to store, manage, and publish
resources; and its resources are freely available
not only to be viewed and used via the WWW,
but also to be shared, adapted, and re-published
under a Creative Commons copyright license.2 The
resources include a general overview of academic
honesty, an introduction explaining different
kinds of plagiarism, an online tutorial for testing
one’s understanding of the various practices that
constitute plagiarism, and dynamic examples of
citations and paraphrasing. The project’s Web
site also boasts a dedicated weblog that serves
as a clearinghouse on all matters plagiaristic,
including news items from around the world and
notices on resources, tools, activities, and events
concerning plagiarism in higher education. Taking advantage of Web syndication, the project’s
weblog makes its content available via RSS feeds.
As a result, anyone can import the project’s news
updates into individual, departmental, or institutional Web sites or weblogs by means of prepared
JavaScripts.3
The CBB Plagiarism Project promotes the
responsible use, re-use, and re-purposing of its
resources so instructors and librarians can address
the problem of plagiarism at the level of local institutional practices, values, and concerns. While
plagiarism undoubtedly is a global problem, its
solution might best be sought at the local level,
where definitions, policies, and expectations
vary widely. The decision to publish content by
means of a weblog has in retrospect leveraged
a technology that has unexpectedly provided a
reflective tool and medium for engaging plagiarism. A consideration of weblog practice and use,
guided by the concept of plagiarism, provides a
framework for understanding the instructional
value of weblogs, especially their ability to foster
and promote learning communities that discourage plagiarism.
Issues, Controversies, and
Problems Associated with
Weblogs
Weblogs basically aggregate meta-data: that is,
they compile information about information in the
form of chronological postings and do not generally publish original content per se. More often
than not, weblogs refer and link to other weblogs
or Web sites, and the result is a highly interconnected network of communication. The resultant
mode of disseminating information has reinforced
certain practices that are commonly understood
as plagiaristic. Researchers at Hewlett-Packard
(HP) Labs have tracked the flow of information
in what they call “blogspace” and have identified how ideas, regularly unattributed, spread
among blogs (Asaravala 2004). The RSS feeds,
moreover, that enable blogs to publish content in
various ways are often understood as contributing
Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs
to plagiarism because they allow unscrupulous
users to capture content (specifically textual data)
and re-purpose it without attribution. Dishonest
practices aside, the HP researchers assert that the
dynamic flow of information in blogspace has a
generative function: individual weblogs “link
together” to create “a complex structure through
which new ideas and discourse can flow.” The HP
researchers, Adar, Zhang, Adamic, and Lukose
(2004), conceive of the circulation of information
among blogs as ultimately creative rather than
iterative and original rather than plagiaristic. This
interpretation of blogs isolates tensions that have
attended the reception of the World Wide Web
from its earliest days. Such tensions similarly
inform cultural perceptions of our students’ use
of the Internet. Their habitual cutting and pasting
and sampling and repurposing are commonly dismissed as purposeless, narcissistic self-expression
and are censoriously viewed as indicative of their
disregard for intellectual and creative property
rights and laws. In a recent article, Ellis (2003)
productively has situated youth culture’s creative
as well as plagiaristic practices in contemporary
contexts.
High school and college students operate
with the conscious or unconscious understanding
(based on a lifetime of practice) that any content
available on or accessible via the Web is public
property and free. By re-using and re-purposing
what they find online, students not only contribute to and reproduce a sub-culture founded on
pastiche, but they also develop and acquire the
transferable skills that Ellis (2003) suggests will
enable those interested to join “the ever-growing
ranks of knowledge workers in post-industrial
economies.” There are drawbacks as well as
benefits to what Ellis envisions as the evolving
“new knowledge environment … chunks up human experience into multiple, cross-referenced
nuggets dispersed in oceanic cyberspace. Stripped
of our distinctively human purposes, the new
knowledge environment is what George Trow
famously called ‘the context of no context.’”
This cutting adrift of knowledge results in its
circulation without respect to historical or cultural
contexts and creates a number of potential abuses
and ethical problems—plagiarism among them.
According to Ellis (2003), however, the “new
knowledge environment” has some potential
benefits that he describes in terms similar to the
HP researchers’ description of blogspace: “This
environment favors those who can apprehend the
interconnectedness of things, create bridges and
connections, spark associations and create the
éclat of montage. . . . Social network analysis,
network topology and other new perspectives are
being framed to help us understand the ‘natural’
dynamics of this new environment.”
The dynamics of the blogosphere represent
potentially exciting developments in cyber-communication, but they simultaneously revisit many
of the criticisms commonly invoked to condemn
the WWW. The Web is many things to many
people: a commerce tool for business; a recruitment tool for new religions; a protest space for
political activism; a play space for dedicated
gamers; and so on. Regardless of its intended use
or unintended abuse, the WWW has provided
interested parties with a readily available means
to publish content of all sorts, and its users have
responded by taking advantage of its publishing
capabilities: according to a recent Pew report,
practically half (or 44 percent) of adult users of
the Internet in the United States have created and
published content (Online Activities and Pursuits,
2004). The value, usefulness, and originality of
that content are an endless source of debate, and
the popularity of weblogs has provided additional
fodder for critics who question the informational
and instructional value of the WWW.
Weblogs tend to promote a confessional mode
of discourse that celebrates self-referentiality
(McDonald 2004). This tendency has fueled the
criticism that blogs have ushered in a new era of
navel-gazing. The form and content of many personal blogs reinforce this view, but virtual personal
diaries do not exhaust the uses and applications
Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs
of blogs. Adar and Adamic (2005) have suggested
that “beyond serving as online diaries, weblogs
have evolved into a complex social structure, one
which is in some ways ideal for the study of the
propagation of information.” Their observation
posits an interrelationship of information and its
circulation that previous scholars have variously
noted—from McLuhan’s “The Medium is the
Message” to Clanchy’s From Memory to Written
Record to Brown and Daguid’s “The Social Life
of Documents.”
In their approach to the interconnectedness
of information and its circulation, Brown and
Daguid (1996) have considered the ways in
which “developing technologies” have historically “supported social relations in new ways.” A
wide range of disciplines and historical examples
inform their understanding. Enlisting Anselm
Strauss’s notion of “’social worlds,’” Brown and
Daguid (1996) describe a dynamic of group formation that can further the understanding of the
culture of weblogs. Following Strauss, Brown
and Daguid (1996) observe that “once formed,
social worlds continually face disintegration (as
dissenting members split off into ‘sub-worlds’).”
The blogosphere seems largely populated by such
sub-worlds that all too often appear to celebrate
a community of one; that is, if one is viewing
weblogs as repositories of content rather than as
nodes within a network. The flow of information
that populates many weblogs, as tracked by the
HP researchers, establishes a social matrix that
assumes both implicit and explicit communities.
Dedicated weblog writers can be roughly divided
into two main types: political bloggers and technobloggers. This overly simplistic distinction falls
short of capturing the full range of representative
blogging sub-worlds (edubloggers, for examples),
but it conveniently describes two influential communities of bloggers.
Drawing on the theory of the “imagined community” proposed by political scientist Anderson
(1991), Seeley and Daguid (1996) further consider
the ways in which “‘popular’ cultural items, such
as journals, novels, pamphlets, lampoons, ballad
sheets, and so forth” contributed to the formation
of national identity in the American colonies
leading up to the Revolution. Citing daily newspapers, in particular, they point out that it was their
widespread circulation and not just their content
that helped foster Colonial America’s sense of
nationhood. The similarities between newspapers
and weblogs are instructive. Many observers have
noted that blogs have greatly contributed to if not
forever changed journalism. McDonald (2004), for
example, understands blogging to be “a genuinely
positive development in mass communication,
and particularly in publishing and journalism.”
He attributes the popularity of weblogging to its
adoption by “the journalistic establishment.” I
would attribute their popularity to their embrace
by alternative journalists, especially the proliferation of “warblogging” in the aftermath of 9/11
and the subsequent events leading up to the U.S.
invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Weblog pioneer and advocate Dave Winer,
moreover, has speculated that newspapers will
ultimately be replaced by weblogs as news sources
in the not too distant future. This prediction is
based in no small part on the publishing ability of weblogs, which has greatly extended the
publishing capacity of the WWW. According to
Winer, “In a Google search of five keywords or
phrases representing the top five news stories of
2007, weblogs will rank higher than The New
York Times’ Web site” (Long Bet).
Solutions and
Recommendations:
Building Learning
Communities via Weblogs
Blogs are powerful and flexible publishing tools:
they publish content rapidly and easily; they provide an archive for content that is readily searchable by date, subject, or keyword; and they can
also publish their content in a number of ways,
Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs
including dedicated Web sites as well as RSS
feeds that can populate other Web sites, weblogs,
aggregators, e-mail clients, and Web browsers.
That which has secured their popularity and
wide reception (the rapid creation, publication,
and circulation of information) also represents
their greatest potential for instruction. Librarians,
technologists, and instructors can capitalize on
blogs for making available a range of resources
and information to targeted users—students, staff,
faculty, and colleagues—both on their own as well
as on other campuses. They can do so, moreover,
with their own content or with content developed
entirely by other institutions. This latter ability,
importing content from elsewhere, demonstrates
how blogs can reinforce the responsible and productive use and circulation of information.
The hallmark features of weblogs (the rapid
creation and dissemination of content) are extremely useful for fostering learning communities
whose members resort to various methods and
media for instruction and information. Certain
integral aspects of weblogs further promote
their instructional potential. Weblogs have not
only made publishing content easier but more
social—they open content development up to a
group by means of their ability to allow various
levels of access to different groups of users; and
they invite dialogue between creators and readers
of content by permitting the exchange of comments
within the blog as well as between blogs. Weblogs
are dynamic in a couple of ways: the content
posted on them changes as information is added
and they allow users to interact by carrying on
a dialogue. This dialogic aspect of blogs enables
content developers to work towards breaking
down the distinction between the creator and the
user of content. This feature of blogs participates
in the trend already discerned by Pew: that the
consumers of Web content are also largely the
producers of it.
Future Trends: Engaging Plagiarism via Multi-Media
The controlled dissolution of boundaries between
producers and users of content (or between instructors and students, for that matter) has emerged
as a valuable lesson of the CBB project’s use of a
weblog. Successful instruction in plagiarism must
strive to increase the awareness of the difference
between the creation of new and the appropriate
use of existing content. The project has sought to
promote this awareness in practice by example
and in theory by instruction. The content is freely
available to be used and re-purposed according
to an “Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike”
Creative Commons Deed. The project developers
have also sought to create learning objects that help
socialize students into the culture of academics,
which is founded on what Green (2002, p. 171)
has described as the “norm of attribution.” Most
teachers take for granted the scholarly conventions used to avoid plagiarism. Recognizing
the profound difference that exists between the
initiated and the uninitiated, the CBB Plagiarism
Project has set out to provide students with guidance and instruction in the standards of academic
integrity. In doing so, it strives to facilitate our
students’ initiation into the norms and practices
of the academic community.
Looking ahead to further development, the
project’s next phase will involve creating a more
adaptive learning environment for engaging
plagiarism. While the weblog provides a valuable
means to deliver, create, and respond to content,
the text-based nature of that content may reinforce some of the limitations of online tutorials
as instructional resources. Jackson (2006, pp.
423-26) has recently considered the effectiveness
of plagiarism instruction online. By developing
media-rich content about the subject (including
audio, video, and animation), the project would
Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs
create a range of resources that better suit diverse
learning styles. In doing so, the project would be
more responsive to the needs of its users and would
further realize its goal of helping to integrate
students into academic cultural practice.
Conclusion
An increased use and understanding of media in
the curriculum, moreover, may very well allow
faculty to harness the creative energies of students in a way that deals with plagiarism in both
practical and theoretical terms readily understood
by students. Current wisdom on how to avoid
plagiarism has emphasized the need to rethink
written assignments—for example, essays should
be conceived of as ongoing processes consisting
of specific, discrete stages or components, all of
which are submitted for review, evaluation, and
assessment, rather than a single finished product
submitted in its entirety only once. In rethinking assignments, instructors may also want to
begin to rethink what writing is and to encourage
non-traditional forms of writing. I have in mind
here the creation of fictional and non-fictional
narratives, reports or accounts by means of multimedia—digital video and audio or computer animation and graphics or any combination of these
and other media. Just as the weblog has emerged
as a reflective tool for considering plagiarism, a
media-rich learning environment would allow
students to begin to understand plagiarism in new
and perhaps more compelling ways. In a recent
essay on plagiarism, the novelist Jonathan Lethem
(2007) describes what it is like to be cut adrift in
our contemporary media environment:
The world is a home littered with pop-culture
products and their emblems. I also came of age
swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet
mysterious to me … I’m not alone in having been
born backward into an incoherent realm of texts,
products, and images, the commercial and cultural
environment with which we’ve both supplemented
and blotted out our natural world. I can no more
claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests
of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to
stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I’d probably better be permitted to name it.
In the academy, students are encouraged to
name and when appropriate cite their sources,
influences, and inspirations. However, finding
themselves, like Lethem, in a world already created and populated with signs, they need to learn
how to negotiate the conventions and practices of
that world and to decode its constituent signs. Educators should begin to make use of the multitude
of media that figures our manifold experiences of
the world. The energy and creativity generated by
such a diversely constituted learning environment
would permit powerful models for rethinking our
engagement of plagiarism.
References
Adar, E. & Adamic, L. A. (2004). Tracking
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October 5, 2006 from http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/blogs2/index.html
Adar, E., Zhang, L., Adamic, L. A., & Lukose, R.
M. (2004). Implicit structure and the dynamics
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Endnotes
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2
3
McDonald, N. (2004). The future of weblogging.
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html
Original project members included Judy
Montgomery and Sue O’Dell, Bowdoin College; Zach Chandler and Marilyn Pukkila,
Colby College; and Thomas Hayward, Bates
College. Jim Hart at Bates College served
as a technical consultant from the project’s
inception and generously provided extensive
support by administering the Linux server
that continues to host the project’s weblog
and resources.
The site is driven by Drupal, a PHP-MySQLbased open-source content management
system, which is freely available to download
at http://www.drupal.org. For further details
on Creative Commons, see http://creativecommons.org.
See http://leeds.bates.edu/cbb/rss/rss.html
for instructions and guidelines. For an example of the feed in action, see the Missouri
State University Libraries, http://library.missouristate.edu/resources/cheating.shtml.
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